★★★✰✰ This year’s Russian Ballet gala was ostensibly in honour of the 200th anniversary of Marius Petipa’s birth. Any choreography attributed to him was mostly a long way ‘after Petipa’, but it’s always fun to see excellent Russian dancers deliver pas de deux from Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Le Corsaire.

★★★✰✰ Every gala needs a revelation, and this one was provided by Sergio Bernal, a Spanish dancer who dominated the stage in an imperious farruca solo from Antonio’s flamenco version of The Three Cornered Hat…

It is even more disappointing that the troupe should open its run with a Swan Lake so lackluster… It’s not the dancers’ fault. At every level, the Bolshoi dancers move with thrilling force and fullness.

There is a lack of egotism to Messerer’s work that is immensely appealing, too: unlike Nureyev or Grigorovitch, he never appears to be coercing the music or the steps into fitting his idiosyncratic vision.

Grigorovich’s staging of Act III is masterly. He has the fakirs lull Solor into an opium-induced sleep in a setting that lifts away to reveal a rocky arch. Within it Solor sees a vision of Nikiya enticing him into a ballet blanc nirvana